The Vox AI platform serves as a multilingual voice assistant for QSRs, enabling customers to place drive-thru and mobile orders autonomously, while supporting staff with real-time shift guidance and alerts triggered by restaurant systems.
Vox AI, the conversational voice AI platform built for drive-thru and operations automations in quick service restaurants (QSRs), has announced it has raised $8.7 million in seed funding led by venture capital firm Headline, with additional participation from True, Simon Capital, and returning investor Souschef Ventures.
The funding brings Vox AI’s total raised to $10 million and will accelerate its global expansion, including the launch of a new office in San Francisco.
Founded in October 2023, Vox AI is focused on the global QSR market, where operators face growing challenges, including labour shortages, high turnover, increasing wage pressures and operational complexity.
The Vox AI platform serves as a multilingual voice assistant for quick-service restaurants (QSRs), enabling customers to place drive-thru and mobile orders autonomously, while supporting staff with real-time shift guidance and alerts triggered by restaurant systems.
ALSO READ: 35 Must-Read Books on Customer Experience
Vox AI’s product offerings and platform features include:
- Autonomous AI: Produces accurate voice AI that replicates natural human speech and service from day one, with no human-in-the-loop during training or deployment—enabling scalable, consistent performance across locations.
- Drive-Thru Voice AI Ordering: Handles orders 24/7 in over 90 languages and dialects with accuracy and speed, ensuring fast-food and QSR patrons can order in their preferred language and style.
- Real-World Intelligence: Voice AI that continuously self-optimises, learning from dialects, menu synonyms, ambient noise, and unique, location-specific building acoustics with a conversation-first training pipeline.
- Seamless Tech Stack Integration: Designed to plug into existing QSR tech stacks without operational disruption.
- Mobile Voice Ordering Integration: Enables voice-based pre-ordering through QSRs’ mobile apps to reduce or eliminate wait times and streamline pick-up orders.
- Employee Assist: A hands-free, voice-first operational tool that supports staff with real-time inventory alerts and shift guidance, for example.
ALSO READ: A Change Coalition with CX Champions Can Boost EX
“Vox AI is pushing voice technology far beyond generic Natural Language Processing. We’re not just improving voice technology. We’re building a new industry standard for how guests interact with fast-food chains and QSR brands they love and how restaurant staff run them,” said Vox AI Co-Founder and CEO Maurice Kroon.
“Our goal is to make voice the de facto interface for every QSR location – without the need to upgrade their current hardware.”
Vox AI’s platform is already being used by many global fast-food chains. The first deployments demonstrate that Vox AI’s technology increases ROI by up to 17 times, shortens drive-thru queues, enhances upselling, drives higher customer satisfaction, and frees up restaurant employees to focus on more meaningful tasks.
“Vox AI delivers something the QSR space has never had before: autonomous, intelligent, real-time voice interaction at a global scale. It’s not a feature – it’s a platform shift,” said Dominic Wilhelm, Partner at Headline.
“We are thrilled to partner with the Vox AI team to power the future of drive-thru and QSR ordering to not only improve companies’ bottom lines, but also reduce employee turnover and improve customer satisfaction.”
ALSO READ: UK Consumers Call on AI to Save “Broken” Customer Service
Microsoft Dynamics 365 represents a robust cloud-based CRM solution with features such as pipeline assessment, relationship analytics, and conversational intelligence. It utilises AI-powered insights to provide actionable intelligence via predictive analytics, lead scoring, sentiment analysis, etc. Currently, Microsoft operates in 190 countries and is made up of more than 220,000 employees worldwide.
HubSpot is an inbound marketing, sales, and customer service software provider, offering robust CRM and automation solutions. Some of its products include Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Operations Hub, Content Hub, Commerce Hub, Marketing Analytics and Dashboard Software. Guided by its inbound methodology, HubSpot enables companies to prioritise innovation and customer success.
Monday.com is a project management software company, offering a cloud-based platform that enables businesses 
Headquartered in San Mateo, California, Freshworks is a global AI-powered business software provider. Its tech stack includes a scalable and comprehensive suite for IT, customer support, sales, and marketing teams, ensuring value for immediate business impact. Its product portfolio includes Customer Service Suite, Freshdesk, Freshchat, Freshcaller, Freshsuccess, and Freshservice. Freshservice for Business Teams has helped several global organisations to enhance their operational efficiency.
Talkdesk offers an innovative AI-powered customer-centric tech stack to its global partners. The company provides generative AI integrations, delivering industry-specific solutions to its customers. Talkdesk CX Cloud and Industry Experience Clouds utilise modern machine learning and language models to enhance contact centre efficiency and client satisfaction.
The company offers comprehensive cloud-based solutions, such as Microsoft Dynamics 365, Gaming Consoles, Microsoft Advertising, Copilot, among other things, to help organisations offer enhanced CX and ROI. Its generative-AI-powered speech and voice recognition solutions,such as Cortana and Azure Speech Services empowers developers to build intelligent applications.
IBM is a global hybrid cloud and AI-powered 
Uniphore is an enterprise-class, AI-native company that was incubated in 2008. Its enterprise-class multimodal AI and data platform unifies all elements of voice, video, text and data by leveraging Generative AI, Knowledge AI, Emotion AI and workflow automation. Some of its products include U-Self Serve, U-Assist, U-Capture, and U-Analyze. Its Q for Sale is a conversational intelligence software that guides revenue teams with AI-powered insights, offering clarity on how to effectively keep prospects engaged.
Google Cloud accelerates every organisation’s ability to digitally transform its business. Its enterprise-grade solutions leverage modern technology to solve the most criticial business problems 
8×8 offers out-of-the-box contact centre solutions, assisting all-size businesses to efficiently meet customer needs and preferences. It offers custom CRM integrations support and integrates effortlessly with third-party CRMs like Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Zendesk, and more. Offering global support in all time zones & development teams in 5 continents, its patented geo-routing solution ensures consistent voice quality.
Sprinklr is a comprehensive enterprise software company for all customer-focused functions. With advanced AI, Sprinklr’s unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) platform lets organisations offer human experiences to every customer, every time, across any modern channel.
Upland offers a comprehensive suite of contact centre and customer service solutions with products including InGenius, Panviva, Rant & Rave, and RightAnswers. InGenius enables organisations to connect their existing phone system with CRM, further enhancing agent productivity. Panviva provides compliant and omnichannel capabilities for highly regulated industries. Whereas, Rant & Rave, and RightAnswers are its AI-powered solutions, 
Zoho Social, a part of Zoho’s suite of 50+ products, is a comprehensive social media management platform for businesses and agencies. The Zoho Social dashboard includes a robust set of features, such as Publishing Calendar, Bulk Scheduler, and Approval Management to offer businesses all the essential social media publishing tools. Its monitoring tools help enterprises track and respond to relevant social conversations.
Hootsuite, headquartered in Vancouver, is a social media management platform that streamlines the process of managing multiple social media accounts. Some of its core offerings include social media content planning and publishing, audience engagement tools, analytics and social advertising. Its easy-to-integrate capabilities help marketing teams to schedule and publish social media posts efficiently.
Brandwatch enables businesses to build and scale the optimal strategy for their clients with intuitive, use-case-focused tools that are easy and quick to master. Bringing together consumer intelligence and social media management, the company helps its users react to the trends that matter, collaborate on data-driven content, shield the brand from threats and manage all the social media channels at scale.
Zoho Corporation offers innovative and tailored software to help leaders grow their business. Zoho’s 55+ products aid sales and marketing, support and collaboration, finance, and recruitment requirements. Its customer analytics capabilities come with a conversational feature, Ask Zia. It enables users to ask questions and get insights in the form of reports and widgets in real-time.
Salesforce-owned Tableau is an AI-powered analytics and business intelligence platform, offering the breadth and depth of capabilities that serve the requirements of global enterprises in a seamless, integrated experience. Marketers can utilise generative AI models, AI-powered predictions, natural language querying, and recommendationsons.
Fullstory is a behavioural data platform, helping C-suite leaders make informed decisions by injecting digital behavioural data into its analytics stack. Its patented technology uncovers the power of quality behavioural data at scale, transforming every digital visit into actionable insights. Enterprises can increase funnel conversion and identify their highest-value customers effortlessly.
Contentsquare is a cloud-based digital experience analytics platform, helping brands track billions of digital interactions, and turn those digital 
Amplitude is a product analytics platform, enabling businesses to track visitors with the help of collaborative analytics. The platform leverages the capabilities of 
Adobe Experience Cloud offers a comprehensive set of applications, capabilities, and services specifically designed to address day-to-day requirement for personalised customer experiences at scale. Its platform helps play an essential role in managing different digital content or assets to improve customer happiness. Its easy-to-optimise content gives users appropriate marketing streams, ensuring product awareness.
Started in 2005 in a Sweden-based small town, Norrköping, Voyado offers a customer experience cloud platform that includes a customer loyalty management system. This platform helps businesses design and implement customer loyalty programs, track customer 
TapMango provides a comprehensive, customisable, flexible and feature-rich customer loyalty program. The loyalty tools include an integrated suite of customised consumer-facing technology, easy-to-use merchant tools, and automation algorithms, all aimed at enhancing customer experience. Adaptable to any industry, TapMango’s platform helps merchants compete with larger chains, converting customer one-time purchases into profitable spending habits.
Adobe Experience Cloud offers a comprehensive set of applications, capabilities, and services specifically designed to address day-to-day requirements for personalised customer experiences at scale. Its innovative platform has played an essential role in managing different digital content or assets, to improve customer happiness or satisfaction. Some of its products include Adobe Gen Studio, Experience Manager Sites, Real-time CDP, and Marketo Engage.
